John Robertson's A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union PDF

By John Robertson

This quantity of scholarly essays explores the guidelines of union and empire present on the time of the Union among Scotland and England in 1707. It demonstrates for the 1st time the broader value of the Union in Europe and through the English-speaking international. it's a significant contribution to the growing to be curiosity in "British" heritage, yet also needs to be of substantial curiosity to all scholars of political and monetary unions, a topic of accelerating value and visible relevance in modern Britain, Europe and North the US.

This quantity responds to the necessity to expand the speculation of citizenship, so as to bridge the space among the general public and the personal sphere. throughout the software of intersectional technique, the authors rfile how people’s so much inner most judgements and practices are intertwined with public associations and country rules.

In Rhetoric, Irony, and legislation within the Formation of Canadian Civil tradition, Michael Dorland and Maurice Charland research how, over the approximately 400-year interval because the stumble upon of First Peoples with Europeans in North the US, rhetorical or discursive fields took shape in politics and constitution-making, within the formation of a public sphere, and in schooling and language.

The observe 'citizen' inspires a selected legacy that's inexorably linked to 'European' values that outline in particular Euro-American states, comparable to secularism, democracy, legislations, and rights. even if, considering 1945, those very values were more and more positioned less than query from a number of views, quite a bit in order that to name them completely ecu values is to come across skepticism.

A foundational paintings within the examine of the globalization of tradition. First released in 1991, tradition, Globalization and the World-System is without doubt one of the inaugural books discussing the expanding tendency of cultural practices to pass nationwide obstacles. Now broadly to be had within the usa for the 1st time and up to date with a brand new preface, those influential essays via a individual staff of cultural critics lay the basis for a necessary new box of inquiry.

Additional resources for A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707

Example text

And today, decades later, I can still pinpoint the moment when I came of age regarding racism in America. My brother and I were playing in Franklin Park in the Roxbury section of Boston when I wandered away alone under a bridge, where a group of older white boys approached me and began calling me names. “Hey, boy, we don’t allow your kind over here,” one of them said. He looked at the others. ” I could tell they weren’t just taunting me, trying to scare me. They were serious, and I turned and ran from there faster than I had ever run before in my life.

It was Amerigo Vespucci, an acquaintance of Columbus, who is credited with America’s discovery in 1497, five years after Columbus landed in the Caribbean Islands while searching for a new route to the spice-rich Far East. Chinese Admiral Cheng Ho, who visited the Americas in 1421, could lay claim as well — and there is also evidence that Scandinavian explorer Leif Erikson reached the Americas hundreds of years before any of these other explorers. Regardless of who “discovered” America, Columbus’s expeditions certainly raised awareness back in the Old World as to the New World’s vast potential for increasing the wealth of those nations that were able to exploit it.

If we have learned over the centuries and have become so smart, why is it so difficult for us to make progress in these areas? If ownership of an idea makes cooperation with its tenets much more likely, why can’t the same principles work for a larger society? The fact of the matter is, there are many examples in early American history where self-governance did work — and extremely well at that. Many of the Quaker societies and the Amish and Mennonite communities functioned efficiently, peacefully, and fairly.